Quotes from book

Wonder Boys

“He looked so profoundly disappointed in me that I wondered for a moment if he was someone I knew.”

“It was nice standing out in the darkness, in the damp grass, with spring coming on and a feeling in my heart of imminent disaster.”

“I said, “I need to hear something that’s going to save my life.”

Re: Selecting songs from a jukebox.”

“He was a fugitive, lurking soul, James Leer. He didn't belong anywhere, but things went much better for him in places where nobody belonged.”

“Undressing her was an act of recklessness, a kind of vandalism, like releasing a zoo full of animals, or blowing up a dam.”

“As long as she was falling in love with me, I might as well start making her promises I didn't intend to keep.”

“I don’t mean to make a big deal out of sobriety, by the way. Of all the modes of human consciousness available to the modern consumer I consider it to be the most overrated.”

“It's always been hard for me to tell the difference between denial and what used to be known as hope.”

“There's nothing more embarrassing than to have earned the disfavor of a perceptive animal.”

“I knew that I shouldn't have, but I did it all the same; and there you have my epitaph, or one of them, because my grave is going to require a monument inscribed on all four sides with rueful mottoes, in small characters, set close together.”

“Every writer has an ideal reader, I thought, and it was just my good luck that mine wanted to sleep with me.”

“Dutifully I thumbed the rides, hopped the B & Os and the Great Northerns, balled the lithe small-town girls in the band shells of their hometown parks, held the job as field hand and day laborer and soda jerk, saw the crude spectacles of American landscape slide past me as I lay in an open boxcar and drank cheap red wine; and if I didn't, I might as well have.”

“It was in this man's class that I first began to wonder if people who wrote fiction were not suffering from some kind of disorder--from what I've since come to think of, remembering the wild nocturnal rockings of Albert Vetch, as the midnight disease.”

“Although it was only nine o'clock he had already gone once around the pharmacological wheel to which he'd strapped himself for the evening, stolen a tuba, and offended a transvestite; and now his companions were beginning, with delight and aplomb, to barf. It was definitely a Crabtree kind of night.”

“Eight solid light-years of lead…is the thickness of that metal in which you would need to encase yourself if you wanted to keep from being touched by neutrinos. I guess the little fuckers are everywhere.”

“…as with most redheaded women what beauty she possessed was protean and odd.”

“The overcoat was a trademark of his. It was an impermeable thrift-shop special with a plaid flannel lining and wide lapels, and it looked as though it had been trying for many years to keep the rain off the stooped shoulders of a long series of hard cases, drifters, and ordinary bums. It emitted an odor of bus station so desolate that just standing next to him you could feel your luck changing for the worse.”

“If Miss Sloviak were not already a transvestite, Crabtree would certainly make her into one.”

“I'm a man who falls in love so easily, and with such a reckless lack of consideration for the consequences of my actions, that from the very first instant of entering into a marriage I become, almost by definition, an adulterer.”